ACTA is being signed right now in the EU | Hacker News Reader

ACTA is being signed right now in the EU

thejournal.ie

The headline is misleading. There are still several national parliaments that need to ratify this (there appears to be a majority against in the Netherlands at the moment), and it has to go through the EU parliament.

The EU parliament is notoriously allergic to these kind of secret backroom shenanigans and corporate manipulations and is eager to prove its democratic value. This is an excellent opportunity to flex the little bit of political muscle it has.

The title is not exactly misleading. ACTA is first signed by the executive branches (foreign ministers or ambassadors), and this is what happened today in Tokyo for most EU nations.

Then ACTA will be ratified by the EU Parliament (i.e. the legislative branch).

Then ACTA will be ratified by national Parliaments. (Where necessary - most likely in all EU countries. A little different story in U.S., where Obama can just put it into law by executive order, because treaties that don't change U.S. law don't need to be ratified by Congress.)

The ratification in EU Parliament is what really counts, because 80-90% of ACTA text applies to EU law, and only a fraction applies to national law. (The latter primarily with regards to criminal prosecutions, which obviously are strictly national jurisdiction.)

National parliament ratification is also not a mere formality. The EU cannot afford to be divided at this moment, or have the mood in member states turned against it even more.

Ironically, rejection by the EU parliament would save the EU a lot of internal headaches. Which is why you could very well see members of parties that support ACTA on the national level reject it in the EU parliament.

Political games: they can tell the US and their copyright mafia friends they've signed it, and the rejection by EU parliament was out of their control...

I really hope you're right about all this. Still wondering why there's no SOPA-style outbreak in any EU country but Poland. Maybe because we all, like me, just sit and wonder?

This is not surprising, since ACTA is still months away from being effective and news concerning its dangers and shortcomings are only now starting to be visible.

However, there is also another, perhaps major, issue: the tech sector is just not as large or impactful as in the US (or, at least, this is the public perception): no community hub such as Silicon Valley, very few dominant businesses, very few startups and VCs capable of flexing their muscles.

I fear that if we are unable to get major US companies to protest ACTA, such legislation might simply slide past unseen by most.

Most EU countries have a multiparty system with somewhat less buyable politicians than the US has in exchange, though. This might help. After all, why else did it take so long for ACTA-ish laws to show up at all?

Or maybe I'm just naive (I like to believe that most of our politicians are selfish and stupid, but not corrupt) and missing something.

There are no outbreaks in other EU countries, because the media don't write/talk about ACTA. So the societies are completely ignorant about ACTA's existence.

In Poland, some mainstream media had the balls to talk about ACTA, which coincided with high-profile "hacking" attacks on govt websites. This lead to a sudden spread of public awareness. And when the kids heard that free downloading of mp3s, movies and porn is threatened, they took to the streets. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3502200)

And how did the media learn about ACTA in the first place? That's still a bit of a riddle to me. Certainly some active NGOs, like the Panoptykon Foundation, and enlightened individuals, like Piotr Waglowski (a lawyer of some fame in the digital community) have contributed by constantly pesking the govt about ACTA.

Well, for instance in the Netherlands, we have a lobby organisation called Bits of Freedom, who are basically an EFF but less Linuxy.

They are usually rather capable of causing a somewhat decent ruckus when nasty stuff happens, and they usually quickly get the support of at least the liberals and the far-right-conservatives (who are pretty consistently in favour of free and open internet though nobody understands why).

Still, nothing about ACTA. Thanks for laying out the Polish case for me though.

Obviously, Bits Of Freedom didn't bother to do much about ACTA.

A digital civil rights movement that prefers secretive backroom politics over public activism is not exactly the right organisation to protest secretive backroom politics...

This is typical for BoF. "They" decide what's important, behind closed doors. They are no different from ruling political class, which is both their strength (when it comes to lobbying) and their weakness (when it comes to representing the people who's rights they claim to stand up for).

The start of the negotiation process was formally acknowledged in various diplomatic venues, as it usually is for these treaties: for such large negotiations the bureaucracy is huge (the days of Molotov-Ribbentropp are long gone), so people knew something was going to happen.

Then negotiators tried hard to keep any interested NGO and independent parties from getting access; inevitably, their interest was piqued even more, and leaks started to appear, as they always do when Evil Stuff is in the works.

I'm pretty sure people like Cory Doctorow were banging the drums about ACTA years ago.

Yeah, but who hears Cory Doctorow, when he writes on his blog, which is read only by geeks.

The problem is breaking through to the wider public, to the mainstream media. We managed to do that in Poland.

> there's no SOPA-style outbreak in any EU country but Poland.

Greetings from Ireland, where we've spent the whole week kicking the government's arse over a nasty bit of Record-Company-Felching, and a Dáil debate was just forced onto the agenda not 15 minutes ago during an emergency discussion.

http://stopsopaireland.com

Oh, and I note that the largest consumer-facing site in the country just did this: http://boards.ie

As a matter of interest what have boards done? I'm abroad on a mobile and it's displaying as normal for me?

It displays the same message that is in this thread as an overlay, blocking out the home page: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056530490

I never said national ratification is a mere formality. In fact, you can count on a huge debate in Poland (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3502200).

I was just saying - even if a national parliament rejects ACTA, 90% of ACTA will still affect that country as a EU member.

And yeah, I'm very hopeful too about the EU Parliament.

BBC News - Thousands march in Poland over Acta internet treaty

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16735219

There were protest yesterday in many Polish cities - biggest in Kraków (15000 according to police), smaller 500-5000 in other cities. People summed it up to about 60 000 people in the whole country.

Today there will be protest in Lublin, Poznan, and other cities. I'm going to the one in Lublin.

Probably nothing's gonna change, but lies of the governament are too much. They say in TV and radio that ACTA won't change a thing in Polish law. And they say we need to change the law to be like in other "civilised" countries. No problem with contradicting themselves.

> Today there will be protest in Lublin, Poznan, and other cities. I'm going to the one in Lublin.

In Warsaw protests are moved to tomorrow because of legal issues (you have to notify 3 days before)

http://www.tvnwarszawa.pl/informacje,news,protest-przeciw-ac...

Other cities today, as you say http://www.tvnwarszawa.pl/informacje,news,acta-podpisana,393...

Yeah, ACTA really exploded in the public awareness in Poland in the past week.

You can read more about it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3502200

And here's some more footage from the protests: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3511980

thanks for all the news!

„Polak, Węgier, dwa bratanki, i do szabli, i do szklanki.”

Wow, "funny" how we heard nothing about this in NL.

Actually your country did NOT sign it yet - hopefully they wont ?

While that's a good thing and indeed hopefully they won't, it would be even better if the Dutch public heard about it, so they'd know which politicians are responsible for not signing it and deserve their support.

Or, if things go bad, which politician budged in the end.

Bringing the matter into public eye might make them less likely to do that.

The reality is nobody here except geeks was aware of ACTA at all. The explosion of media attention started about a week ago, and even polititians were totally unprepared to handle any reposnse and it looked like they were surprised that finally somebody noticed it. Even the most pro-govt media didn't leave it alone, but it's sad that the case was raised so late. Too bad we don't have any real rock-stars on the tech scene to speak up, such as sopa had google, reddit, etc. Most media coverage include interviews with old tards in suits and some rotting entertainment celebs skewing up the view on this issue talking about their precious mp3s nobody listens to anyway, and on the other side they show protesting people way too young to speak about it in a reasonable manner. I'm all happy about the protests emerging, but it's too bad we lack influencial people in the tech sector to handle this issue on a substantive level.

If the article is accurate, then I hope that the EU Parliament will listen to the tech sector for a change. Unfortunately, I doubt we'll get a Blackout style campaign like SOPA had in the US.

Some Polish web sites had blackout ( http://di.com.pl/news/43067,0,Polski_blackout_przeciw_ACTA_j... ), but mostly sites with young and tech-savy users. So general population only know about Anonymus group cracking gov servers, and maybe about protests on the streets.

The EU Parliament is a relatively benign organism. Elections are held with a proportional system across Europe, so it's quite easy for MEPs to lose seats to smaller parties; this basically forces them to listen to constituents, most of the time, or risk being defeated by, say, Greens or Pirate Party. Since they don't really have much of a say in nominating the "EU government" (i.e. the Commission), they don't really experience the drawbacks of such a system.

The problem is, in most cases the Parliament cannot veto what the Commission approves. There is a constant, constitutional struggle between them, but the Commission has the upper hand in most cases. This is because the Commission is nominated by (and directly works with) member states; in practice, if all states' governments agree to something, the EU Parliament probably wouldn't be able to stop them. At most, they could delay some decisions, hoping that political winds in member states will change in the meantime.

There are ways to fight, although very tough. The FFII.org did a wonderful job on swpat. They did go for ACTA too, but sadly with less focus -- I cannot blame though.

If it does go through and border searches for pirated media become a reality, it would be terribly unfortunate if random people had encrypted files on their computer that they don't know the password to, entering the UK. In fact any unexplained binary file of about 3mb could be an encrypted mp3. Handover the password: or rot in contempt of court. EFF are right about encrypting your disk as a new years resolution. This could be a disaster if it gets fully ratified.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agree...

"exempts travellers from (border) checks if the infringing goods are not part of large scale traffic" I'd love to know how they expect border security guards to determine what's part of large scale traffic and what's not.

"jailed over computer password refusal": http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-11479831

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3514232 - ACTA will NOT pass as of now since it's in validation of Basic Human Rights Bill, so it looks with exception of Poland and Czech EU is safe, but i have high hopes that our (polish) parliament will not ratify the document.

I find it funny how they try to use iTunes and the music purchased from iTunes as an example for how this legislation would affect people, even though music purchased from iTunes has been DRM free for a few years.

They way ACTA was planned shuld not be possible for any democratic nation. This clearly shows that we have to evlolve you democratic systems.

Nice related trivia: If the EU would apply to become an EU member state, it would be rejected because it's not democratic enough.

Yes, that's a problem and yes, it'll take decades to fix.

Haha I knew the fact but heavn't quite heard it put like this :)

I don't really like the EU I would rather have a free market zone and travel zone without all the other stuff, Europe should not become an Empire.

Is ACTA potentially affecting desktop applications that are storing encrypted information to the cloud using private-public keypair? Private key would be available only locally.

From ACTA it's not clear for me if desktop app provider should start storing the keypairs in case a law enforcement asks for the access to the data.

Any ideas?

German European Parliament facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/EP.Informationsbuero.fuer.Deutschlan...

German EU parliament contacts page: http://www.europarl.de/view/de/Service/Anfragen_Kontakt.html

Ugh... Where can I march against this?

Site about ACTA in EU and protests: http://whovotesforacta.eu

Thank you.

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